Another Round of Hacked Climate Emails – Fool Me Once…

Karl Marx famously wrote that “history always repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, and the second as farce.” I hope we can skip the tragedy step in this case and go straight to the farce, with people seeing it for the farce it is. Two years after the so-called “climategate” scandal, hackers have released another batch of hacked emails from climate scientists. Here’s an excellent article by Stephan Lewandowsky from the University of Western Australia – “There is a real climategate out there”. First he recounts the NINE INDEPENDENT INQUIRIES that all found that the climategate accusations against climate scientists were completely unfounded. Then he draws attention to the real climategate: the relentless campaign of misrepresenting climate science and attacking climate scientists that is being waged by some “think tanks”, politicians and key media outlets.

When the science is so rock solid that it can no longer be reasonably doubted, all that is left is to steal private correspondence in a desperate attempt to disparage those who are trying to protect the world from the risks it is facing.

And Joe Romm points out that climate scientists have apparently been too cautious rather than too alarmist.

in the real world, Arctic sea ice is disappearing faster than the IPCC climate models projected, the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are disintegrating faster than the climate models projected, the tropical zones are expanding faster than the models projected (a key cause of Dust-Bowlification), and, sadly, greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than the primary worst-case IPCC scenario (…)